As I write this we are on our seventh week “being Abaco.” If you haven’t heard of Abaco Systems, we’re a brand new company formed when GE spun out its rugged embedded computing business. In the mil/aero market, we were known as GE Intelligent Platforms for the past decade. Our roots go back thirty years, to companies like Radstone Technology, VMIC, SBS Technologies, and Condor Engineering. We’re also a company in transformation—a company that is channelling the energy that comes from acquiring a new identity and new ownership to raise the bar for ourselves, with a laser focus on serving customers.
What’s in a name?
One thing was clear from the get-go. On day one, we needed a name.
We could have done a ton of market research and spent forever debating the subject of names. We didn’t. "Abaco" came up pretty early in our discussion. It was simple—and we want Abaco to be an easy company to do business with. It was different—and we wanted our company to have the courage to adapt as needs continue to evolve. It had an interesting linguistic connection to 3,000-year-old computing devices (talk about long life!). And we liked the sound of it enough to endorse it. Deciding on a name quickly provided us a ton of extra time to develop and communicate the Abaco brand.
